Washington (AFP) – Researchers in the United States say they have discovered the fossil remains of a lot of creatures that died minutes after a huge asteroid struck into the ground 66 million years ago and sealed the fate of dinosaurs.

In a paper to be published on Monday, a team of paleontologists at the University of Kansas headquarters say they found a "mother of exquisite preserved animal and fish fossils" in what is now North Dakota.

The asteroid influences what is now Mexico was the most disastrous event ever known to hit the earth, exterminating 75 percent of the planet's animal and plant species, extinguishing the dinosaurs and paving the way for human emergence.

The researchers believe that the effect is redundant, seismic flooding, which triggered a sudden massive flow of water and waste from an arm of an inner sea, known as the Western Inner Sea.

At the Tanis site in North Dakota's Hell Creek formation, the transition "on angled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures", according to Robert DePalma, left the report's lead author.

Some of the fish factories proved to have inhaled the "ejecta" with the Chicxulub event reaching the point that seismic shocks reached North Dakota within "many minutes," he said.

"The sedimentation happened so fast, everything is preserved in three dimensions – they are not crushed," co-author David Burnham said.

"It's like an avalanche that collapses almost like a liquid, then sets as concrete. They were killed pretty suddenly because of the violence of that water. We have a fish that hit a tree and was broken in half. "

The fossils of Tanis include what was believed to be several newly identified species of fish and others that were" the best examples of their species, "said DePalma, a graduate student and curator of the Palm Beach Natural History Museum. in Florida.

"We are looking at instant records of one of the most notable impact events in Earth's history. No other side has a record like that," he said.

"And this particular event is tied directly to all of us – for every mammal on Earth. Because this is essentially where we inherited the earth. Nothing was the same after that impact. It became a planet of mammals rather than a planet of dinosaurs. "The paper must be published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences.